Modern portable electronic devices such as mobile phones, tablet computers, personal digital assistants, and music players are able to store a large amount of data. These devices include an array of functions, including wireless communications capability and they often have computing power than compares to many of the bulky personal computers made in recent years.
Because of this, many people use their portable electronic devices as handheld computers. This is particularly true in the medical field where medical professionals often store and view patient data on a portable electronic device rather than on handwritten charts. Devices that allow patients to record their own physiological data and transmit the data to their physician's computer or portable electronic device now exist. These devices are particularly advantageous because they allow physicians to monitor their patients remotely.
Physicians typically perform auscultation using a stethoscope to listen to the body's internal sounds. This allows the physician to determine whether the patient is having any heart or lung issues. People have developed electronic stethoscopes that allow these sounds to be recorded for subsequent analysis. People have also developed stethoscope-like attachments for portable electronic devices such as smart phones to record these sounds on the deviceS themselves.
There are drawbacks associated with many of the existing stethoscope-like attachments for portable electronic devices. In many cases, the design of the attachment is rudimentary, meaning that it is engineered to serve more as a novelty than as a professional medical instrument. As a result, the sensitivity of these attachments is low and the signals they detect are noisy. Also, because many of them are heavy and bulky, a user cannot easily take them wherever the user goes by, for example, placing the attachment in the user's pocket.